As some readers may have noticed (assuming you can access us at all), the performance of Troppo is still distinctly dodgy despite Jacques shifting from his original choice of WordPress web host. Its name was WpEngine and it provided next to no service during the day in Australia (because it’s the middle of the night in America where they’re based). Moreover its servers crashed for prolonged periods of time and repeatedly.
The current host (called Page.ly) apparently answers support requests although it doesn’t actually seem to solve problems. Its servers don’t crash for hours on end, they just have intermittent outages every couple of minutes! It’s very irritating but ultimately Troppo is just a hobby blog, albeit one of which I am proud and wish it was actually hosted reliably (as it was for years by Jacques Chester before career pressures forced him recently to enlist the “services” of a commercial web host).
While Troppo is just a hobby, however, I’m in the process of creating a brand new law practice as part of a plan to flee the Tropics and migrate back to southern Australia in the next couple of years. The venture is heavily dependent on a reliable web presence. Hence this bleg. Does anyone (either with an IT job or a small-medium business that is heavily web-reliant) know of a reliable and at least vaguely affordable web host that does a good job with WordPress-based sites? Our site will be based on a WordPress platform and will ultimately be fairly large in size and hopefully have significant traffic (although not at first obviously).
PS And Page.ly’s latest hijink is that in its latest crash a couple of minutes ago it has (yet again) deleted most of the sidebar images that I spent over an hour this afternoon reinstating. What a truly marvellous service!!!
PPS No hang on, the images have returned now! Bizarre …
Ken, I have used http://www.ipower.com for many years for a dozen domains, from not deep pocket. They do I believe offer wordpress, though I don’t use it. Very fast, high reliability. Worth a look.
Thanks for this interesting place.
I’m not sure if it’s the recent host, but since the last migration I can only log into comment on posts (like now) on one browser at a time. The permitted browser changes randomly. However I can always log into the Troppo back end. It’s a minor problem (given that discussions on Chinese history don’t move at a twitter like pace), but tremendously bemusing.
I use dreamhost.com for my (admittedly poorly maintained and low volume) word press blogs. The few times I have had issues, they have been consistently quick at keeping me informed of the status of the problem and the resolution progress.
They provide several levels of pricing, from $USD9 for simple shared hosting http://dreamhost.com/web-hosting/ up to dedicated hosting for $US99 – $US249 per month
I obviously don’t have the same hosting requirements as you, so it may be worthwhile looking at a couple of their customers.. However, it its worth noting that they are one of the providers recommended by wordpress.org – see http://dreamhost.com/partners/wordpress/
thatnks for the site, and i hope this helps
http://blog.dreamhost.com/2012/06/13/customer-spotlight/
http://blog.dreamhost.com/2012/06/28/customer-spotlight-2/
http://blog.dreamhost.com/2012/09/12/customer-spotlight-indie-shuffle-with-jason-grishkoff/